I don’t understand at all why you lump entertainment and religious purposes into a single hypothesis and treat evidence for one as evidence for the other. If we accept that our universe is being simulated for entertainment purposes, it would still not give us significant reason to believe that it’s being simulated for religious purposes.
Talking about religious purposes was an afterthought. Nobody does that today. It’s conceivable that religions in the future could tell people to run simulations. I wasn’t really thinking of a player who wanted to be God; I was thinking of religions that might work things out in simulations for some reason, or have some occult beliefs about the relationship between the world and simulations, or believed it was their moral duty to emulate the Creator.
If the person running the sim wanted to be personally glorified within it, I would expect them to do a much, much better job of arranging it. I would adjust this one down several orders of magnitude.
I think you’re saying something like, “What is the probability that we are in a simulation whose purpose is for the player to be a religious figure whom we worship and glorify?” Whereas I lumped that case in there as an afterthought, and am more interested in the higher-probability scenario that we are in a simulation that is supposed to be fun for the player, where the player get credit for playing well, but getting credit/glory is not supposed to be easy. It wouldn’t be fun then.
If we imagine this is sim after the style of a game like Civilization, where the player is measured along multiple metrics of success and has competition from multiple other factions, I would substitute P(rel|sim) with P(rel|gamesim), the probability that religious veneration is one of the metrics in the game, but I would assign P(gamesim) a much lower probability than P(sim), because it occupies a very small part of the probability mass that I assign to a simulation. As before, a large part of the improbability would come from locating that particular type of sim in possibility space.
I would also have to revise P(follow-thru) way down, because more than in the other scenario, it seems like it would be a complete waste of time, completely tangential to the purpose of the simulation and not at all worth the computation time it would take.
Talking about religious purposes was an afterthought. Nobody does that today. It’s conceivable that religions in the future could tell people to run simulations. I wasn’t really thinking of a player who wanted to be God; I was thinking of religions that might work things out in simulations for some reason, or have some occult beliefs about the relationship between the world and simulations, or believed it was their moral duty to emulate the Creator.
I think you’re saying something like, “What is the probability that we are in a simulation whose purpose is for the player to be a religious figure whom we worship and glorify?” Whereas I lumped that case in there as an afterthought, and am more interested in the higher-probability scenario that we are in a simulation that is supposed to be fun for the player, where the player get credit for playing well, but getting credit/glory is not supposed to be easy. It wouldn’t be fun then.
If we imagine this is sim after the style of a game like Civilization, where the player is measured along multiple metrics of success and has competition from multiple other factions, I would substitute P(rel|sim) with P(rel|gamesim), the probability that religious veneration is one of the metrics in the game, but I would assign P(gamesim) a much lower probability than P(sim), because it occupies a very small part of the probability mass that I assign to a simulation. As before, a large part of the improbability would come from locating that particular type of sim in possibility space.
I would also have to revise P(follow-thru) way down, because more than in the other scenario, it seems like it would be a complete waste of time, completely tangential to the purpose of the simulation and not at all worth the computation time it would take.